Biography

• You can download the class presentation of notes here. 
• She was born in 1908 and died in 1986.
• At the time of her death she was honored as a crucial figure in the struggle for women's rights, and as an eminent writer, having won the Prix Goncourt, the prestigious French literary award, for her novel The Mandarins. She was also famous for being the life long companion of Jean Paul Sartre. 
• She is best known for her 1949 work The Second Sex. From the time it was published, it was considered to be a " foundation piece for feminist theory" and has continued to influence feminism since that time. The work was also attacked by many who considered its frank discussion of sexuality inappropriate, especially for a female author.
• Beauvoir did not consider herself a philosopher, but an author. In fact, she described herself a as a "midwife" of Jean Paul Sartre's existential thought rather than as a thinker herself. As time has passed, however, her influence has grown.
• Beauvoir's influence on the French political and cultural world faded in the 1960s as she embraced communism and become an outspoken critic of colonialism.
• Once she died in 1986, a more fully developed picture of de Beauvoir emerged, as Sally Scholz wrote in her 2000 book On de Beauvoir: 

Since 1986, Beauvoir’s letters and journals have been published, shining new light on the most interesting intellectual relationship of the 20th century. Included in this material is new evidence of the influence she exercised on Sartre’s work, and influence she denied during her lifetime. It has become clear that the woman who changed the course of feminism also plays a pivotal role in the development of existentialist morality. During her lifetime and for many years after, Beauvoir was described merely as a companion to Sartre. Only recently is her unique contribution gaining the recognition it deserves.

Her Philosopy

The Other

• She wrote: One is not born a woman, one becomes one.’ In effect, sex is not gender.  The former is a biological fact, the latter a social construction.  While she argues it would be absurd to ignore differences in sex, constructs of gender are most often used to oppress women. 
• Beauvoir argued that men had made women the "Other" in society by putting a false aura of "mystery" around them.  She argued that men used this as an excuse not to understand women or their problems and not to help them, and that this stereotyping was always done in societies by the group higher in the hierarchy to the group lower in the hierarchy.  She wrote that this also happened on the basis of other categories of identity, such as race, class, and religion.  But she said that it was nowhere more true than with sex in which men stereotyped women and used it as an excuse to organize society into a patriarchy. 
• She references Hegel's philosophy and argues that men identify themselves as the Master and identify women by this standard of the human, seeing them as weak and inferior. Paradoxically, women are regarded as inferior for following the male definition of what it means to be female and punished for deviating from it. 
• Beauvoir argued that women have historically been considered deviant, abnormal.  She said that even Mary Wollstonecraft considered men to be the ideal toward which women should aspire.  Beauvoir said that this attitude limited women's success by maintaining the perception that they were a deviation from the normal, and were always outsiders attempting to emulate "normality".  She believed that for feminism to move forward, this assumption must be set aside.   

Criticism of Feminine Nature 

• She argues against the idea of a "feminine nature"--the centuries old concept of a timeless feminine essence that stands as the model of passivity and unapproachable purity in contrast with the implied masculine essence as one of activity and subjectivity.
• She argues that just as there is no essence of a person, there is no essence of what it means to be a woman.
• She contends that this eternal feminine nature places a burden on women because of its contradictory features.  
• It presents woman as the mother and nurturer to whom we owe our lives and who deserves our loving gratitude but also as the source of our mortality (Eve in the Biblical Garden of Eden) and thus deserving of our hatred and blame.
• Benjamin Jones explains the implications of this myth of feminine nature, when he writes :

Society had been conditioned to understand that history, philosophy, politics, even actions and ideas, are occupied in the male sphere; “a man never begins by presenting himself as an individual of a certain sex.” It is, by contrast, an anomaly of sorts, when a woman makes a contribution to these fields.  Beauvoir describes the frustrating position women find themselves in when expressing ideas.  A man, she notes, may criticise feminine discourse by claiming, “you think thus and so because you are a woman.” If a woman retorts, however, “you think the contrary because you are a man,” it is by no means an insult.  Beauvoir suggests the woman’s only defense is to claim, “I think thus and so because it is true,” as this method negates the concept of the male ‘One’ and the female ‘Other’. 

Liberation

• As a result, she argues that we need to tear down the patriarchal structures that are the vehicles of oppression which define women.  Ideally, in de Beauvoir's vision of the future, men and women will live in a society that is free of oppression, a society in which individual men and women are free to create themselves.  
• Beauvoir asserted that women are as capable of choice as men, and thus can choose to elevate themselves, moving beyond the 'immanence' to which they were previously resigned and reaching 'transcendence', a position in which one takes responsibility for oneself and the world, where one chooses one's freedom.